For decades, General Electric was happy to reap the enormous profits that arose from its finance arm as it swelled into one of the country’s biggest lenders.

But as banking has become a less profitable and riskier business, G.E. will complete a transformation it began amid the tumult of the financial crisis: selling off most of that division over the next two years.

Beginning by selling $26.5 billion worth of real estate assets, G.E. is hastening to return to its roots as one of the mightiest industrial companies in the world, whose operations include jet engines, oil drilling equipment and medical devices. What it will mostly shed is GE Capital, a lender with hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of assets.

The move announced Friday reflects the shifting landscape of the financial world, especially for the largest players. They face greater regulatory scrutiny and calls from analysts and investors to slim their operations or break up. Some are shifting their focus to areas like wealth management as traditional activities like trading prove less profitable. It is no surprise that G.E. decided to re-evaluate its role in this ecosystem.

The divestiture campaign, code-named Hubble within G.E. and put together in about six weeks, will erase one of the main legacies of the conglomerate’s vaunted former chief executive, John F. Welch Jr. But it is also a recognition that manufacturing, not finance, represents the company’s future.

“We’re not sentimentalists,” Jeffrey R. Immelt, the multinational’s current chairman and chief executive, said in an interview.

G.E.’s expansive campaign will bring other changes as well. In shrinking its far-flung empire, the company will also bring back $36 billion in cash that now resides overseas, taking a $6 billion tax hit in the process. And it will also press to relieve itself from the burdens of being considered a too-big-to-fail lender, a status that brings stricter regulatory requirements.

The wide range of asset sales will help finance a huge return of money to shareholders, which G.E. estimates will eventually reach $90 billion. About $50 billion will come from a stock repurchase, one of the biggest on record.

“Jeffrey Immelt will have truly remade the company,” said Steven Winoker, an analyst at Bernstein Research. “This is a massive strategic reallocation of capital and investment.”

G.E.’s moves, Mr. Winoker said, are likely to quiet rumblings from some investors and analysts that Mr. Immelt should step down, and give him time to execute the plan, which runs through 2018.

Shareholders applauded the announcement, pushing shares in G.E. up nearly 11 percent on Friday, to $28.51, levels unseen since the financial crisis.

The downsizing is no small matter for a company whose empire encompasses 175 countries and employs about 305,000 people. But since the fall of Lehman Brothers in 2008, which set off market upheaval that badly wounded G.E. when GE Capital struggled to borrow, the conglomerate has been selling off pieces of its finance operation.

The expansion of the finance business was part of the broader diversification of G.E. starting in the 1980s under Mr. Welch, when American industry feared it might not be able to compete against Japan. In 1986, for example, G.E. bought RCA, mainly for its NBC television network, a lucrative cash-generating business at the time, immune from foreign competition.

Mr. Immelt, who took over in 2001, shared some of that enthusiasm for nonindustrial businesses. In 2004, G.E. acquired 80 percent of the Hollywood studio Universal Pictures. And while Mr. Immelt selectively sold some financial operations, GE Capital continued to grow, especially in commercial real estate and other loans. In 2004, G.E. even bought a subprime lender in California, WMC Mortgage, which it shed in 2007 for a $1 billion loss.

For years, the financial tilt looked smart and relatively easy. In an interview in 2010, Mr. Immelt recalled, if a deal looked like a moneymaker, it got the nod. “And you don’t have to build a factory,” he said.

Yet the big bet on finance badly wounded G.E. after Lehman’s demise, when the market upheaval left the conglomerate hard-pressed to borrow debt for its day-to-day operations.

Since the financial crisis, G.E. has taken steps to shrink its finance operation, selling off smaller pieces over the years. In one of its most notable moves, it spun off its private-label credit card arm — now known as Synchrony Financial — in a $2.9 billion initial public offering last year.

Mr. Immelt said the company focused on moving carefully, its board mindful “not to burn stuff out” at fire-sale prices.

Yet executives increasingly thought that its existing efforts were lost upon the market. And G.E. felt increasingly constrained by its financial arm, which like other lenders has suffered from far less growth than in the past.

And the company was ready to take advantage of a way to shed its designation as a “systemically important financial institution” — the official name for a lender deemed by the government as too big to fail. The so-called Sifi status imposes additional restrictions and requirements upon companies, potentially limiting their earnings growth.

So in February, James B. Lee Jr., the vice chairman and top deal maker at JPMorgan Chase, received a call. Could he meet with G.E.’s top management?

Both he and Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s chief executive, went to meet with Mr. Immelt, as well as Jeffrey S. Bornstein, its chief financial officer, and Keith S. Sherin, the chief executive of GE Capital.

Along with Centerview Partners, they received the bombshell assignment. And it would be a sprint. What ensued were six weeks of daily meetings that stretched for hours.

The divestiture campaign will be led primarily by only two firms, both in line to claim large fees and great prestige. Both JPMorgan and Centerview have been longtime G.E. advisers, having played prominent roles on some of its biggest deals. JPMorgan, which was named global coordinator for the disposition plan, advised G.E. on its sale of NBCUniversal to Comcast, and last year it helped lead the spinoff of Synchrony. And for Centerview, a boutique investment bank, the GE Capital plan will be another plum assignment. Leading the charge for the firm was one of its co-founders, Blair Effron, who advised on G.E.’s $13.5 billion takeover of the energy assets of the French conglomerate Alstom.

With G.E.’s mind made up, one of the first potential deals that came up was the disposal of most of the finance arm’s real estate holdings. The most obvious buyer was the Blackstone Group, one of the biggest buyers of properties on Wall Street.

The deal team, which included Bank of America and Kimberlite Advisors, called the head of Blackstone’s team, Jonathan D. Gray, and offered him the opportunity to buy exclusively, as long as he was willing to move fast and pay up.

“We thought there was only one buyer who can do this: Jon Gray at Blackstone,” Mr. Sherin of GE Capital said. “We told him, ‘If you can hit this bid on an exclusive basis, it’s yours.’ ” Mr. Gray responded quickly, setting up what became the $26.5 billion worth of real estate deals announced on Friday.

Despite not putting the real estate assets up for a competitive auction, which may have fetched a higher price, Mr. Sherin declared himself happy with the result. Moving this way assured G.E. of both a speedy and certain transaction.

“Both parties think they got a fair price,” he said.

G.E. said it would remain an acquirer of businesses as well, though its deals would be aimed at bolstering industrial operations, like its purchase of the Alstom assets. But more sales will come. While G.E. has allowed itself two years to carry out the plan, the company’s executives and advisers anticipate that a huge portion of the deals — particularly for assets in the United States — will be finished by sometime next year.

The company is also confident that subsequent sales will generate attractively priced offers. Even before Friday, according to the people briefed on the disposal process, the biggest private equity firms around the world have asked whether the GE Capital division that lends to leveraged buyouts would ever come up for sale.

Other potential buyers include financial institutions around the world, including big American lenders and Canadian, European and Japanese banks eager to snap up businesses as they go up for auction.

“It’ll be a food fight,” one of the people briefed on the process said.

Steve Lohr contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: General Electric, in a Reorganization, Will Sell Off Its Financial Division. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe